By Pete Wickham

Count the Sandy Plains Wildcats among the best teams you haven’t heard about this season – until now.

The Atlanta area’s “other” 14U squad earned its shot at all of the big boys later this summer, punching its ticket to the USSSA Elite 32 tournament with a 10-5 win over a Louisiana Tiger that squad that had entered the weekend undefeated, but despite two losses claimed its berth in Orlando.

Dylan Swaggerty’s solo homer ignited a five-run sixth-inning outburst that put things away for the Wildcats, and Travis Wildermuth capped the inning with an RBI triple. Steven Savlich had three hits to help make a winner Colton Cannon. Jamie Thaggerd pitched the final three innings for the save.

“We’ve won three tournaments this year, but obviously this is the biggest,” Wildcats coach Jeff Nichols said. “We beat East Cobb earlier this season, and yet they’re stil in the rankings and we’re not. We don’t worry much about that. We’re just getting better.” Swaggerty had struggled through much of the tournament until he delivered the big blow. “I struck out eight straight times. Then I got one high and inside where I really like it,” he said. Wildermuth said that blast, “really got us going.” The Tigers were just glad to be going home with the bid they’d hoped to have last week in Houston, but fell short in the semifinals.

“We stunk that game,” Tiger coach Leo McClure said after his team clinched the berth in the finals with a 10-0 blowout of the eighth-ranked Indiana Prospects.
The Tigers got five innings of shutout ball from start pitcher  Andrew Fournet, who also pitched in a win Saturday night. “He barely got to 50 on pitch count,” McClure said. “He throws so easy.”

Catcher Jordan Romero capped a three-run burst in the second with a two-run double, and the Tigers added four in the second and three in the third against an exhausted Indiana squad, who had played a 10-inning first-round bracket win, 5-4 over Legends Baseball of Smyrna, Tenn., that ended at 2:30 a.m. Sunday morning.

“We had the bases juiced in the first, got nothing and that turned things totally,” said Prospects coach Shane Stout. “We were tired, but situations happen like that in tournaments like these. We’ve got to learn to adjust.” The Tigers had been adjusting all weekend, with several key players racing to Southaven after their middle school graduations.  That was a big reason for a 9-1 loss to the BL Bombers of Birmingham on Saturday morning.

Fournet’s father, Marc, raced his son, Romero, James Smith and Myles Dearman up I-55 on Saturday afternoon, getting there just before a 5-3 first-round win over the always-formidable Memphis Tigers. The day before, Tom Lo Savio made the same run with his son David “and we got here just in time for him to be the 10th player,” he said. As gametime approached Saturday, Lo Savio said he got a phone call from Marc Fournet. “They were 15 miles from Southaven, and the low fuel light came on … I went out to meet them at the interstate to make sure we could get the boys there.

“But part of me wanted him to run out of gas. Would have never let him live it down,” Lo Savio added with a laugh. McClure said that after beating the Prospects and clinching the berth, “we really didn’t want to play the final. Sandy Plains did and I told them I’d play everybody and bat everybody.” The Tigers did jump to a 2-0 lead, and trailed by just 4-3 after four innings. Sandy Plains knocked off 10th seeded Germantown Giants by an 8-0 count in the semifinals, with Cannon scoring three runs.

To show the strength of this field, the Giants won both their pool games (including a 6-5 win over Legends)  – and still had to get through the play-in round. “That got us,” Giants coach Joe Caruso said, “We don’t have enough arms to play six games in two days, but our kids played well all weekend long.”

Both the Wildcats and Tigers notched quarterfinal shutouts. Sandy Plans put away Jackhammer Baseball 5-0, while the Tigers blitzed the Rawlings Legends of St. Louis 8-0.  The Germantown Giants  defeated Gameday Athletics of Huntsville, Ala. 10-2 in the quarterfinals. The Prospects got past Bullet Baseball of Louisiana 5-3 behind a homer and double by Joe Dudek.

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